Knights of the Golden Circle
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encyclopedia
The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) was a
secret
society. The original objective of the KGC was to annex a golden circle of territories in Mexico (which
would be divided into 25 slave states), Central
America, northern South America, and Cuba and the rest of
the Caribbean
for inclusion in the United States as slave
states. As anti-slavery agitation increased after the Dred Scott Decision was issued, the members
proposed a separate confederation of slave states, with
US states south of the Mason-Dixon line to secede and to align with other
slave states to be formed from the golden circle. In either case, the goal was
to increase the power of the Southern slave-holding upper
class to such a degree that it could never be dislodged. [1]
During the American Civil War, some Southern sympathizers
in the Northern states such as Ohio, Illinois,
Indiana, and Iowa, were accused of belonging to the Knights of the Golden
Circle, and in some cases were imprisoned for their activities.
Contents
[hide]
- 1 Early history
- 2 Civil War and demise
- 3 Alleged members
- 4 Represented in other media
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 Further reading
- 8 External links
Early history[edit]
George W. L. Bickley, a Virginia-born
doctor, editor, and "adventurer" who lived in Cincinnati,
founded the association. Records of the K.G.C. convention held in 1860 state
that the organization “originated at Lexington, Kentucky, on the fourth day of
July 1854, by five gentlemen who came together on a call made by Gen. George
Bickley….”[2]
He organized the first castle, or local branch, in Cincinnati in 1854.
Hounded by creditors, he left Cincinnati in the late 1850s and traveled through
the East and South, promoting an expedition to Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War of 1846, the group's
original goal was to provide a force to colonize the northern part of Mexico
and the West
Indies. This would extend pro-slavery interests.
Civil War and demise[edit]
In the Southwest[edit]
The South’s secession
and the outbreak of the Civil War prompted a shift in the group's plans for
Mexico to support of the new Confederate government. On February
15, 1861, Ben McCulloch, Texas Ranger, began marching toward the
Federal arsenal at San Antonio, Texas, with a cavalry force of
about 550 men, about 150 of whom were Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) from
six castles[3][citation
needed]. As volunteers continued to join McCulloch the
following day, the U.S. Army Gen. David
E. Twiggs decided to surrender the arsenal peacefully to the secessionists.
KGC members also figured
prominently among those who, in 1861, joined Lt. Col. John
Robert Baylor in his temporarily successful takeover of southern New Mexico Territory[4][citation
needed]. In May 1861, members of the KGC and Confederate
Rangers attacked a building which housed a pro-Union newspaper, the Alamo
Express, owned by J. P. Newcomb, and burned it down.[5]
Other KGC members followed Brig.
Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley on the 1862 New Mexico Campaign, which sought to bring the
New Mexico Territory into the Confederate fold. Both Baylor and Trevanion Teel,
Sibley's captain of artillery,
had been among the KGC members who rode with Ben McCulloch.
In the North[edit]
In early 1862, Radical Republicans in the Senate, aided by
Secretary of State William H. Seward, suggested that former
president Franklin Pierce, who was greatly critical of the
Lincoln administration's war policies, was an active member of the Knights of
the Golden Circle. In an angry letter to Seward, Pierce denied that he knew
anything about the KGC, and demanded that his letter be made public. California
Senator Milton Latham subsequently did so when he entered the
entire Pierce-Seward correspondence into the Congressional Globe.
Appealing to the Confederacy's
friends in the North and border states, the Order spread to Kentucky as
well as the southern parts of such Union states as Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. It
became strongest among Copperheads, some of whom felt that the Civil
War was a mistake. Some supported slavery and others were worried about the
power of the federal government. In the summer of 1863, Congress authorized a military
draft, which the administration soon put into operation. Loyalist Leaders
of the Democratic Party opposed to Abraham
Lincoln's administration denounced the draft and other wartime measures,
such as the arrest of seditious persons and the president's temporary
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.
During the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, scam artists in
south-central Pennsylvania sold Pennsylvania Dutch farmers $1 paper tickets
purported to be from the Knights of the Golden Circle. Along with a series of
secret hand gestures, these tickets were supposed to protect the horses and
other possessions of ticket holders from seizure by invading Confederate
soldiers.[6]
When Jubal
Early's infantry
division passed through York County, Pennsylvania, they took what
they needed anyway. They often paid with Confederate currency or drafts on the
Confederate government. The Cavalry commander J.E.B.
Stuart also reported the alleged KGC tickets when documenting the campaign.[7]
That same
year, Asbury Harpending and California
members of the Knights of the Golden Circle in San Francisco outfitted the
schooner J. M. Chapman as a Confederate privateer in
San Francisco Bay, with the object of raiding
commerce on the Pacific Coast and capturing gold shipments to the East Coast.
Their attempt was detected and they were seized on the night of their intended
departure.[8][9][10]
In late
1863, the KGC reorganized as the Order of American Knights. In 1864, it
became the Order of the Sons of Liberty, with the
Ohio politician Clement L. Vallandigham, most prominent of
the Copperheads, as its supreme commander. In most areas only a minority of its
membership was radical enough to discourage enlistments, resist the draft, and
shield deserters. The KGC held numerous peace meetings. A few agitators, some
of them encouraged by Southern money, talked of a revolt in the Old
Northwest, which could have ended the war.[11]
Conspiracy theory[edit]
According
to a few historians, after the Civil War, the KGC went underground and became a
secret society. The KGC's new mission was to support a second, former
confederate, uprising against the U.S. Federal Government. Furthermore, it has
been alleged the James-Younger Gang was the principal source of
funds for a second U.S. Civil War that never occurred.[12]
Alleged members[edit]
· Confederados
(some)
·
Buckner Stith Morris[13]
·
Lambdin P. Milligan
·
John Wilkes Booth[14]
·
Jesse James[15]
·
Sam Houston[16]
Represented in other media[edit]
The Night of The Iron Tyrants (1990–1991), written by the
novelist Mark Ellis, and drawn by Darryl
Banks, was a four-part comic book miniseries
based on The Wild Wild West TV series. It featured
the Knights of the Golden Circle in an assassination plot against President
Ulysses Grant and the president of Brazil during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were featured as
the villains of the graphic novel Batman: Detective No. 27 (2003) by Michael
Uslan and Peter Snejbjerg.
The Knights of the Golden Circle are featured as
the villains in the CD-ROM game PONY EXPRESS RIDER, published by
AMERIKIDS USA and McGraw-Hill's new division, McGraw-Hill Home
Interactive.
The Knights of the Golden Circle were portrayed as
the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination in the Disney movie National Treasure 2: Book of
Secrets (2007).
In the William Martin (novelist) 2012 novel,
"The Lincoln Letter", The Knights of the Golden Circle are featured
as group of conspirators in Washington,
DC during the Civil War.
In the 2011 novel, "Queen of the Northern
Mines," [17]
the Knights of the Golden Circle are portrayed as conspirators plotting to
seize a gold shipment from Nevada County, California, on its way to San
Francisco.
The Knights of the Golden
circle were a key part of Brad Meltzer's novel, The Fifth Assassin.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
1. Jump up ^
Woodward, Colin American Nations: A History of
the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America New York:2011 Penguin
Page 207
2. Jump up ^
Campbell, Randolph B. "KNIGHTS
OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE". Handbook of Texas Online. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
3. Jump up ^
Keehn, David C. Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret
Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2013.
4. Jump up ^
Thompson, Jerry D. Colonel John Robert Baylor: Texas
Indian Fighter and Confederate Soldier. Hillsboro, Tex: Hill Junior College
Press, 1971.
9. Jump up ^
"The Pacific Squadron of 1861–1866", in
Aurora Hunt, The Army of the Pacific; Its Operations in California, Texas,
Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Plains Region, Mexico,
etc. 1860–1866
10.Jump up ^
John Boessenecker, Badge
and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1997. pp. 135–136
Ayer, I. Windslow, The
Great North-Western Conspiracy in All Its Startling Details. Chicago:
Rounds and James, 1865. p.47 retrieved
October 30, 2010
·
Jump up ^ Michael Benson Inside
Secret Societies, p. 86, Kensington Publishing Corp., 2005 ISBN
978-0-8065-2664-5
·
Jump up ^ Hurley, Richard (2011). author.
Grass Valley, CA: Bear River Books. p. 330. ISBN 9780983179801.
Further reading[edit]
- Selected
bibliography
- Boulard,
Garry, "The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President
and the Civil War" (iUniverse, 2006)
- Bridges,
C. A. (1941). "The Knights of the Golden Circle: A Filibustering Fantasy".
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 44: 287–302.
- Crenshaw,
Ollinger (October 1941). "The Knights of the Golden Circle: The
Career of George Bickley". American Historical Review 47
(1): 23–50. doi:10.2307/1838769. JSTOR 1838769.
- Curry,
Richard O. (1964). A House Divided. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
- Dunn,
Roy S. (April 1967). "The KGC in Texas, 1860–1861". Southwestern
Historical Quarterly 70: 543–573.
- Frazier,
Donald S.; Shaw Frazier (1995). Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire
in the Southwest. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press.
ISBN 0-89096-639-7.
- Getler,
Warren; Bob Brewer (2003). Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to
find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-1968-6.
(currently published under the title of Rebel Gold isbn=978-0-7432-1969-3)
- Hicks,
Jimmie (July 1961). "Some Letters Concerning the Knights of the
Golden Circle in Texas, 1860–1861". Southwestern Historical
Quarterly 65: 80–86.
- Keehn,
David (2013). Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern
Secession, Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
- May,
Robert E. (1973). The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
Louisiana State University Press.
- Milton,
George F. (1942). Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column. New
York, New
York: Vanguard Press. OCLC 816967.
- Mingus,
Scott L. (2009). Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Gordon Expedition. Columbus,
Ohio: Ironclad
Publishing. ISBN 0-9673770-8-0.
- Schrader,
Del (1975). Jesse James Was One of His Names. Arcadia, California:
Santa Anita Press.
External links[edit]
- Sam Lanham
Digital Library Schreiner University
- Knights
of the Golden Circle entry in the Handbook of Texas
- eHistory
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